


The Crayak Chronicles

by wanderingaesthetic



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 04:30:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2940320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderingaesthetic/pseuds/wanderingaesthetic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even cosmic horrors have origin stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Crayak Chronicles

My name is Crayak, as you well know.

  
I create this record for two purposes. First, to remind myself of where I have been. I must not forget the depth and breadth of my accomplishments, nor should I forget the astounding degree of failure of which even I am capable. I am the longest lived of my race, and am therefore uncertain of the longevity of my organic brain. I have redundancies in place, but should those fail, this record will remain.

  
The second purpose is so that you, Arch-Delegator of the Republic of Inner Fa-Nah, will not forget me. If you are hearing this record, it is because you have succeeded in ousting me from your beloved galaxy. You believe that you have won, but you are wrong. I have attached this record to your personal implants. They have arrested all of your functions until you have heard what I have to say, and after you have heard what I have to say, you will die, along with the majority of the population of your beloved planet. For you see, I have left a certain virus in your defense grid. You had foresight enough not to gather the firepower to vaporize your planet, but I will nonetheless succeed in killing millions of your people. Your race will survive, unfortunately, but you are living through the last hours of its political and cultural power.

  
In those hours you will learn how I, a worm, have beaten you utterly.

#

I was spawned a member of the race your recorded history calls the Glendath. I will not be surprised or offended if you have never heard of us. Explorers from Fa-Nah had some minimal contact with us thousands of years before I came to exist. I imagine the habits of my race disgusted your explorers as they are about to disgust you.

  
My first memories are of sucking slime from cavern walls. I was without sight or hearing, but because I had never possessed ears or an eye, I could not miss them. I could taste, and I had a rudimentary sense of smell, but the majority of my world existed beneath my feelers. The jagged crack that shielded me while I rested told of the geologic shifts of bygone ages, a smoothed knob of stone spoke of a millennia of slowly dripping water. I did not know these things, however. Not then.

  
I knew only the sludge that fed me. It was life. My only love and my only pleasure.

  
Occasionally, distant vibrations would reach my feelers. My instincts screamed for me to flee. I obeyed, not knowing why. At times, I encountered things similar in size and form to myself. Our feelers would slide across each other, indifferent to anything that we could not eat.

  
I grew, and my appetite grew with my body. Soon, I struggled to find enough slime to feed myself. Forced by my hunger, I took the first rite of passage of my species. When another, much smaller grub passed within my reach, I bit into it, taking first the strong front feelers, the ones that would develop into arms had the hapless creature lived long enough to grow them. I tore them away with my oral spines. The taste of the meat, the texture of the juices on my tongue, were more pleasing than anything I had yet known. I devoured the head, taking away the sense organs and effectively killing it. I took the body next, relishing the way the feelers continued to squirm inside of me long after I had taken my meal.

  
After the first taste of meat, I could not resist its lure. I began to actively hunt the others like me. I ate slime only as a last resort. As I ate more of them, I seemed to grow more intelligent, more self-aware, and more cunning. I would wait in crevices for the minute vibrations of my prey. I would snatch them up and devour them before they suspected anything. The more of them I ate, the more I seemed to grow. My spines grew sharper. My feelers grew stronger, forming the rudiments of true arms and hands. All served only to make me a more efficient killer.

  
Yes, those I ate were of my own species. Yes, I was aware they were like myself, though only dimly. And yes, they were sentient, though they had less than the intellects of your yearling children. Does that upset you, Arch-Delegator? Know this, though you have been trained to think otherwise, though you believe all your art and all your science prove that you are something greater, all life seeks only its own life and its own pleasure. There is no higher nature. There is only nature.

  
After one of my periods of rest, I became aware of a new input on my synapses, a sense entirely other than taste and touch. I didn’t know what this sense was or what it meant, could not even realize that the yellow, lacy, glowing substance that I saw all around was the slime that had nurtured me, until I approached it and sucked up a bit of it experimentally.

  
I was now able to sight my prey from many meters away, stalk them by moving only when they moved, and make the kill before the other even knew it was hunted. But a newfound ease in hunting was not the only advantage of sight. Now that I could see, I was able to form a mental map of my surroundings. I was in a tunnel carved of stone, approximately ten times the width of my own body. The tunnel was long and twisting, I followed its course for a great distance before it terminated in a dead end, as if whatever had made it had stopped there and turned back, or perhaps died there.

  
As I continued to hunt and explore, another of my senses awakened, though at first it only served to disturb my rest. A steady, incessant plinking invaded my head, doing nothing but disturb my rest. Yet as I continued to roam and hunt I recognized it as a more refined version of my sense of touch, and the plinking disturbance as the vibrations made by water droplets as they fell from holes in ceiling above, holes too small for me to climb through.

  
I was young and foolish, and before long I had devoured every creature like myself in that hole. The last was difficult. He was nearly my own size, and clever. We stalked one another until something, hunger perhaps, drove him to attack me directly. He was strong, but I had the advantage of size. I held him down and dug my spines into him again and again and again until at last he stopped struggling. He was quite a meal, but eat him I did, saving his eye for last. I lay there for what I would soon learn were days, blissfully paralyzed by own gluttony.

  
Ah, the appetite of the young.

  
When I began to come out of my stupor, I realized that there was nothing else moving around me, that there hadn't been in the entire time I had lain motionless.  
I was once more reduced to eating slime, but I required so much food now that eating it almost wasn't worth my while.

  
I wandered my tunnel. Most of my surroundings were bare, unyielding stone. The holes that water dripped from were the only clue there might be something outside. I examined each hole. None were large enough to accommodate me. The largest I could stick my eye through, but all was total darkness beyond. I tried reaching a hand through instead, and came back with a fist full of some dark substance, softer than stone. Soil.

  
I ate it, but it gave me no pleasure.

  
I desperately ground at the hole with my spines during every waking hour, driven by hunger and desperation. The stone around it gave, but slowly, falling down around me in a fine dust. Slowly, I made an opening large enough to pull myself through, and dug into the soft soil beyond.

  
The layer of soil was not great. Less than the length of my body. My eye was suddenly struck by light brighter than I had ever known. I squinted against the blazing light and pulled myself onto the surface of my world for the first time.

  
When my eye adjusted, I was met with the sight of another of my kind, at least three times my height and girth.

  
I rose myself up, ready to strike though I was trembling with hunger and the effort of my dig. I was so much smaller than this one, and terrified that he would eat me.

  
I must make myself not worth the trouble, or at least cut him as I died.

  
He watched me, but made no move to attack.

  
“I see you’re not a small fellow. Or meek, either. You will serve us well, I think. Here, eat.”

  
He tossed me a hunk of some unfamiliar meat. I did not understand his words, didn’t know they were words, but I understood the language of food. I ate, greedy and grateful.

  
“What are you called, young one?” he asked after I had eaten.

  
Once more, I did not know the words, but sensed something was expected of me. I opened my mouth and let out a dry croak.

  
“Crayak, eh?”

  
I had reached the second rite of passage of my people. I had a name.


End file.
